Digital Making Blog
I am passionate about digital making and producing fun, engaging sometimes useful projects often with a Raspberry Pi and a printer. The latest 20 blog posts are shown below, or use the search box.
Resistance is futile
Wearable technology / cosplay This project is an adaption of a project I found online and the full details can be found here https://www.instructables.com/Resistance-Is-Futile-How-to-Become-the-BORG/ As with many projects I adapted some of the steps and have listed them below. All Borg cosplay The printing of the main components I printed parts Borg arm 1, 2 and 3 in vase mode using black PLA. This drastically reduced the print time and whilst a certain amount of definition was lost it was more than acceptable for what I wanted visually and structurally. As soon as these parts came off the printer I tidied
Resistance is futile
Wearable technology / cosplay This project is an adaption of a project I found online and the full details can be found here https://www.instructables.com/Resistance-Is-Futile-How-to-Become-the-BORG/ As with many projects I adapted some of the steps and have listed them below. All Borg cosplay The printing of the main components I printed parts
3D Printing and painting
Over the last two years I have been working on developing my 3D printing painting skills. Coming from a position of never painted before I have watched many hours of YouTube videos on how to develop texture in painting. I am very pleased with how this one has turned out.
RPi Digital making at home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9eVaVVSaeM&t=47s Since the 30th March 2020 the Raspberry Pi Foundation have been broadcasting a live show every Wednesday across the various social media platforms called Digital Making at home. The range of presentations has been amazing and there have been so many highlights for me. The videos make great resources
A Year of Digital Making
2021 – A year of digital making January Euro Truck Simulator dashboard February Pico watering can
Raspberry Pi Pico Watering Can
Do I need to water my plants? The rationale behind this project was to design a project which could be built in school by students for under £15. I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi Pico, a sensor input and some form of output. I decided to go for a
Adventures in Raspberry Pi Pico – part 1
The Raspberry Pi Pico was launched last month and I have been waiting until half term to have a serious ‘play’. I am not really going to create anything groundbreaking or revolutionary but am very interested in how I can use it in school. My first project looks at setting
3D printer maintenance tips
3D Printer Maintenance and cleaning I have found over the last four years of 3D printing that my printer only really exists in one of two states: Working really well and producing beautiful prints every single time or me hating it so much that I wish I had never bought
Euro Truck Simulator 2 Dashboard
As a big fan of both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck simulator I wanted to build a physical dashboard that not only controlled the game but received real-time telemetry data back from the game. The final build uses both a Raspberry Pi Zero to read the server data
Animal Crossing Fireworks
Last night was the first Animal Crossing New Horizons fireworks night in August and brought some exciting new game play to ACNH. As someone who is not a hard core gamer in any sense I have really enjoyed the 500+ hours spent on ACNH since Easter! There is a certain
Mahjong Wind Indicator
About 25 years ago my in-laws taught me how to play Mahjong, recently we have started playing with our own kids. I was quite suprised to see their wind indicator was still a piece of scrappy paper that they must have made about 30 years ago. In the tradition of
Textured paint (Owl)
After the success of my first textured paint job I thought I would have a go at doing something that would look good with this paint. I went for an owl statue (see attribution below) as I wanted to see how the paint would handle the different contours of the
Textured paint
Over the last year I have been working on improving the quality of my acrylic painting of models and have definitely seen a big improvment. I have wanted to try and extend this by using some textured finish on models so bought for £10 a can of Rust-Oleum textured multi
Turret Malfunction
Turret Malfunction by Flye001, SirHorse I am really excited to share this game with you, written by my 15 year old son Philip with graphics by one of his friends from school. This was an entry to a game jam by GMTK and they only spent 48 hours developing this.
Heated bed repair
Earlier in the year my heated bed failed during every print. The print would get about 75% through and then have a thermal runaway error which stopped the printing. Looking through the terminal messages on Octoprint it appeared to be an issue with the heated bed losing about 5oC and
3D printing for dummies
Getting started with 3D printing Back in April I ordered my first 3D printer, I had used several before and thought I knew a little bit about how to use one etc I settled on the Startt 3D printer from iMakr which comes in at a very respectable £99.99 and
Pi-mp3
Introducing the Raspberry Pi MP3 player With so many great audio apps on my phone carrying around a second mp3 player is a bit of a silly idea. However with the launch of the Pimoroni audio pHATS at the end of 2019 I had wondered if I could build myself
Adventures in Painting
At the start of the summer I had got to a point with my printing on my CR10S that I could hit print and be almost certain that I would get a good print. This was the point where I decided that my focus should shift to the finishing and
3D Fault finding
Today was the first time since buying my CR10 back in July that have I had significant problems with it. I am currently 2 hours into a 8 hour print and everything seems to be going well (fingers crossed). The fault appeared to be an issue with extrusion with a
Filament review: PLA Pink Silk (Kexcelled)
I have been using the PLA professional filaments from kexcelled for just over a year and thought I would do a quick review of the silk: pink. This one can be purchased from 3dprintz.co.uk for £15.99 for 500g here. I like the silk filaments, they have a very nice touch
Theatre Lamp
Ever since I first illuminated an LED I have wanted to build a custom bluetooth enabled theatre light using a Raspberry Pi. Aims of the project: Build a full size theatre lantern with colour changing LEDs which operated off 5V and could be controlled without logging into the Pi over
Filament review: PLA Matte Moss Grey
hank you to filamentive for sending me their tester pack to sample. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to print the same two prints and photograph under similar conditions. The second filament to be sampled is their PLA Matte – Moss Grey Both the vase and fish